BEA snaps up Fuego

BEA bought Fuego today, which starts to bring home the predictions about consolidation in the BPM marketplace. Press release here on ebizQ or here on the BEA site, which includes the usual hyperbole from the CEO:

We are now the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments.

There might be a few of BEA and Fuego’s competitors that disagree with the “only” qualifier, although this marriage of ESB, BPM and other integration technologies does provide good coverage of the space, reminiscent of the Staffware acquisition by TIBCO a few years back. Fuego will form the foundation of BEA’s new AquaLogic Business Service Integration product line, and give BEA a much better story for talking to business executives, instead of just chatting with the IT guys like they’ve been doing in the past.

This is the second key acquisition for BEA in the past year, following their acquistion of Plumtree last summer. They’re definitely building out their integration capabilities, and doing so by including products that are fairly platform-agnostic for the widest appeal. The real test will be to see how tightly this stuff is integrated a year from now: it’s not enough to just slap a BEA label on Fuego software, there needs to be technical infrastructure reasons and goals for making an acquisition like this.

One interesting thing that I noticed from the press release and the conference call is the strong link made between BPM and SOA (something that I’ve been writing about for some time). On the conference call, Mark Carges from BEA refers to BPM as “the fastest growing segment of SOA”.

You can hear a replay of the 20-minute announcement conference call at mshow using the show number 292109.